According to the state of the art, printed products, in particular printed products of large editions, are produced by forming at least one printing mold in the form of e.g. a plate or cylinder in a first method step; by printing on paper in form of sheets or a quasi-endless paper web with the printing mold in a second step; and by producing multi-page printed products [possibly also printed products with only one page] such as, e.g., newspapers, magazines, brochures, books, etc. in a third step comprising different steps of further processing such as folding, cutting, collecting, stitching, binding and/or gluing. Furthermore, for the distribution of the finished printed products, they are individually or in groups packed and equipped with addresses and packing slips.
When printing with printing molds, the mold is normally pressed onto the paper again and again in succeeding printing processes or it is rolled over the paper, whereby the size of the printing pattern repeated again and again due to the printing process is given by the size of the printing mold. For a printing mold in the form of a cylinder which rolls over a quasi endless paper web, the printing pattern repeated on the paper web is maximally of the same width as the printing mold or the paper web and as long as the circumference of the printing mold. In book printing, usually printing molds are used which correspond to eight pages, such that a sheet printed on both sides corresponds to sixteen book pages [eight sheets].
In order to print a further printing pattern, not only an additional printing mold must be produced but the molds must also be exchanged on the printing machine. The printing method with printing molds is the more efficient the larger the number is of the specimen to be printed with the same printing mold and it is the most efficient if all these specimens are printed in immediate succession.
If a printed product is to be produced with printing molds in a very large edition wherein the size of the product is such that it can only be printed with a plurality of different printing molds, this means that either a plurality of printing machines corresponding to the number of the necessary printing molds is to be employed and the outputs of these machines are to be further processed in parallel, or it requires successive printing with different molds and intermediate storage of the output substantially until the printing process has been completed, followed by subsequent production of the finished printed products. Obviously the first method requires a lot of investment while the latter requires a lot of time. Intermediate forms of the two methods described above are of course also common.
Recently, especially in the field of newspapers and magazines, demands for reducing the actual size of an edition, i.e. the number of absolutely identical products to be produced, have increased. These demands reach from region-specific or interest-specific editions to totally individualized single products and from copies consisting of a selection of different sections [e.g. same contents with different covers or different supplements] to copies with different contents [e.g. individual selection of articles or individual advertising sections]. This kind of demand can be met to a certain degree with the methods described above, but this obviously leads to a considerable decrease in efficiency.
In order to be able to realize the smaller editions as demanded and the higher individualization of the single copy using the methods described above but with a tolerable loss of efficiency, in a current development it is tried to organize the further processing of printed products and in particular to design, to control and to couple devices for further processing in such a way that flexibility is increased and production of products which are individualized to a higher degree becomes possible without changing the actual printing method. This development leads to systems as they are e.g. described in publication EP-0511159 or U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,895 and in the publication DE-19524912.
Newspapers and magazines which have actually been printed as an edition of identical copies can, e.g., be made ready for mailing by means of the following steps of further processing: inserting of supplements compiled according to the addressee, which supplements can at least partly comprise addressee-specific information printed by a specially provided printer [e.g. answering cards with individual sender's address], additional individual printing on the inside or outside [e.g. individual address], individual packing or packing in groups depending on the address for which collected packages such as address sheets and packing slips are produced with a further printer. Individualized newspapers can also be compiled in a sequence corresponding to a postal route and packed to form collected packages. The cost regarding software and control for such methods, however, is obviously considerable.
It is also foreseen that this kind of system will reach limits regarding the achievable degree of flexibility and specimen individualization such that the demand as named above will not be able to be fulfilled indefinitely.